Electric furnace steelmaking's raw materials

The traditional electric arc furnace steelmaking is a full scrap process, mainly cold scrap, with about 10% pig iron added. Other raw materials used in modern EAF steelmaking include: in addition to cold pig iron, direct reduced iron (DRI, HBI), hot molten iron, iron carbide, etc.

The raw material composition of EAF steelmaking has a decisive influence on its process, equipment and indexes. The production processes under different raw material structures are not comparable, or only when the raw material structures are equivalent.

Materials of electric arc steel furnace steelmaking 

1. Steel scrap

Electric furnace steelmaking is not only a process of iron resource recovery and reuse, but also an environmental protection technology to deal with pollution.

As far as the electric furnace steelmaking process is concerned, scrap is the basic raw material. The scrap raw materials need to be identified, classified management, packaged, cut and other pretreatment.

At present, the biggest problem of using scrap raw materials in electric furnace steelmaking is metal residual elements, mainly residual alloy elements such as Ni, Cr and Mo and harmful elements such as Cu, Sn, Bi, SD and Pb. They have not been removed effectively in the process of electric furnace steelmaking, causing various hazards in steel and accumulating continuously in the process of scrap recycling.

At present, the countermeasures mainly include: strengthening scrap management; selecting or separating scrap in the process of scrap pretreatment; adding other iron sources in the smelting process to dilute the concentration of residual elements.

2. Other metal materials

Chilled pig iron: carbon blending, dilution of residual elements and increase of slag

Direct reduction iron: granular direct reduction iron (DRI) and block hot pressed block (HBI)

Molten iron: when 10% hot molten iron is added, the physical heat brought in is about 25kwh / T-steel and the chemical heat is about 25kwh / T-steel (while the oxygen consumption is 6-7m3 / T-steel)

Iron carbide (Fe3C): technical problem, can not be mass produced.